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A lot has happened in the Android world since our last post, with new devices being announced and going on and off sale. Most importantly, however, Android 4.2 has been released and made its way to AOSP. It's an evolutionary upgrade, bringing various improvements and some new user and developer features. This time around, security related enhancements made it into the what's new list, and there is quite a lot of them. The most widely publicized one has been, as expected, the one users may actually see -- application verification. It recently got an in-depth analysis, so in this post we will look into something less visible, but nevertheless quite important -- certificate pinning.
PKI's trust problems and proposed solutions
In the highly unlikely case that you haven't heard about it, the trustworthiness of the existing public CA model has been severely compromised in the recent couple of years. It has been suspect for a while, but recent high profile CA securitybrea…

In the first part of this series, we presented how the standard Android online account management framework works and explored how Google account authentication and authorization modules are implemented on Android. In this article we will see how to use the Google credentials stored on the device to log in to Google Web sites automatically. Note that this is different from using public Google API's, which generally only requires putting an authentication token (and possibly an API key) in a request header, and is quite well supported by the Google APIs Client Library. First, some words on what motivated this whole exercise (may include some ranting, feel free to skip to the next section).
Android developer console API: DIY
If you have ever published an application on the Android Market Google Play Store, you are familiar with the Android developer console. Besides letting you publish and update your apps, it also shows the number of total and active installs (notoriously broken an…

Our recent posts covered NFC and the secureelement as supported in recent Android versions, including community ones. In this two-part series we will take a completely different direction: managing online user accounts and accessing Web services. We will briefly discuss how Android manages user credentials and then show how to use cached authentication details to log in to most Google sites without requiring additional user input. Most of the functionality we shall discuss is hardly new -- it has been available at least since Android 2.0. But while there is ample documentation on how to use it, there doesn't see to be a 'bigger picture' overview of how the pieces are tied together. This somewhat detailed investigation was prompted by trying to develop an app for a widely used Google service that unfortunately doesn't have an official API and struggling to find a way to login to it using cached Google credentials. More on this in the second part, let's first see how…

We discussed the embedded secure element available in recent Android devices, it's execution environment and how Google Wallet makes use if it in the last series of articles. We also saw that unless you have a contract with Google and have them (or the TSM they use) distribute your applets to supported devices, there is currently no way to install anything on the embedded secure element. We briefly mentioned that CyanogenMod 9.1 supports software card emulation and it is a more practical way to create your own NFC-enabled applications. We'll now see how software card emulation works and show how you can use it to create a simple PKI 'applet' that can be accessed via NFC from any machine with a contactless card reader.
Software card emulation
We already know that if the embedded secure element is put in virtual mode it is visible to external readers as a contactless smartcard. Software card emulation (sometimes referred to as Host Card Emulation or HCE) does something v…